Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Trochilus colubris), Volume 1, Plate 47

Painted between 1822 and 1825.

Audubon represents ten pairs of hummingbirds distributed over virtually the entire area of the sheet, engaged in the process of extracting nectar from trumpet flowers. The large red blossoms of the plant virtually obliterate the diminutive birds. Especially in the case of the two males with their heads stuck (or about to be stuck) in them, it seems impossible to tell who is swallowing whom, making this plate a humorous, benign variation of Audubon’s characteristic theme of the predator-turned-prey. A side effect of this representation is that the viewer begins to see the world with the hummingbird’s eyes-as large, overpowering, brilliantly colored, full of delicious opportunities for gathering sustenance. Audubon’s plate directly inspired a passage in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous 1847 poem Evangeline, set on the Atchafalaya, where “the trumpet-flower and the grapevine Hung their ladder of ropes aloft like the ladder of Jacob, on whose pendulous stairs the angels ascending, descending, were the swift humming-birds that flitted from blossom to blossom.”

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

Could you, kind reader, cast a momentary glance on the nest of the Humming Bird, and see, as I have seen, the newly-hatched pair of young, little larger than humble-bees, naked, blind, and so feeble as scarcely to be able to raise their little bill to receive food from the parents; and could you see those parents, full of anxiety and fear, passing and repassing within a few inches of your face, alighting on a twig not more than a yard from your body, waiting the result of your unwelcome visit in a state of the utmost despair,-you could not fail to be impressed with the deepest pangs which parental affection feels on the unexpected death of a cherished child. Then how pleasing is it, on your leaving the spot, to see the returning hope of the parents, when, after examining the nest, they find their nurslings untouched! You might then judge how pleasing it is to a mother of another kind, to hear the physician who has attended her sick child assure her that the crisis is over, and that her babe is saved. These are the scenes best fitted to enable us to partake of sorrow and joy, and to determine every one who views them to make it his study to contribute to the happiness of others, and to refrain from wantonly or maliciously giving them pain.